Spatial Theories for the Americas: Counterweights to Five Centuries of Eurocentrism (Culture Politics & the Built Environment)

Shortlist, 2025 Architectural Book Award in Architectural Theory

To study the built environment of the Americas is to wrestle with an inherent contradiction. While the disciplines of architecture, urban design, landscape, and planning share the fundamental belief that space and place matter, the overwhelming majority of canonical knowledge and the vernacular used to describe these disciplines comes from Europe, a very different continent. With this book, Fernando Luiz Lara discusses several theories of space―drawing on cartography, geography, anthropology, and architecture―and proposes counterweights to five centuries of Eurocentrism. The first part of Spatial Theories for the Americas offers a critique of Eurocentrism in the discipline of architecture, problematizing its theoretical foundation in relation to the inseparability of modernization and colonization. The second part makes explicit the insufficiencies of a hegemonic Western tradition at the core of spatial theories by discussing a long list of authors who have thought about the Americas. To overcome centuries of Eurocentrism, Lara concludes, will require a tremendous effort, but, nonetheless, scholars and architects of the Americas have the responsibility of looking at their built environments through their own lenses. Spatial Theories for the Americas proposes a fundamental step in that direction.

Fernando Luiz Lara is professor of architecture at the Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Rise of Popular Modernist Architecture in Brazil and coauthor of Street Matters: A Critical History of Twentieth-Century Urban Policy in Brazil and Modern Architecture in Latin America.